When certain right-to-life groups stated they were against letting Terri Schiavo die, they meant it, and they continue to attempt to breathe life into her (and more importantly, the issue), grasping at anything they can find to prove that yes, indeed, Terri Schiavo was but one more CAT scan from going for a walk. The latest attempt is spearheaded by Dean Esmay, and unlike past, more notable resurrections, this time it is those performing the resurrection coming out of the cave, and without the grand ideas.
To spare you the time of reading the whole post, Dean says the following:
1.) He was the victim in the Schiavo affair:
In the next day or two I got trackbacks from obscenity-shrieking asshats hurling nothing but epithets at me. Because the medical examiner had basically determined that Terry was blind and deaf at the moment of her death (after more than a week with no food or water, as I recall).
Those are just samples. I was then, and am now, simply stunned at the fierceness of absolute conviction from those who disagreed with me. For some (not all by any means) seemed to need to do more than disagree with me. Terry’s parents, siblings, and childhood friends needed to be denounced as 100% wrong, and Michael Schiavo had to be lauded as 100% right, period. To suggest anything to the contrary was simply evil. Or, at best, boneheaded: anti-science, anti-rational, anti-humanist, anti-everything-good.
To state that the medical examiner “basically determined that Terry was blind and deaf at the moment of her death” is, like it or not, anti-science, anti-rational, and, to boot, assinine. She wasn’t ‘basically’ blind. She was completely and totally blind. In fact, the term is ‘cortical blindness,’ and was discussed in detail in that tricksy autopsy with all those technical terms. Take it away, Will Saletan:
According to Terri Schiavo’s autopsy report, her “lateral geniculate nucleus (visual) demonstrated transneuronal degeneration with gliosis.” Or, as the medical examiner put it in plainer English, “Her vision centers of her brain were dead. Therefore, Mrs. Schiavo had what’s called cortical blindness. She was blind, could not see.”
That isn’t what Schiavo’s parents, pro-lifers, and congressional Republicans told us all these years. They said videos showed her eyes following people and objects. “In the video footage, which you can actually see on the Web site today, she certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist declared three months ago as he spearheaded a congressional invasion of the case.
Using small words- Terri Schiavo could have had 32 eyeballs and she still would be blind. Not ‘bascially’ blind- full fledged, constant darkness, no sight, see no evil, blind.
2.) Terri Schiavo might have lived, had she been given a wafer thin mint or a zolpidem:
And you know, I wouldn’t have written about it again, except in the last week two stories in the news came to my attention. #1 is anecdotal but nonetheless powerful. #2 is more than anecdotal, and is in fact deeply disturbing in its implications. Here they are:
1) Mental Activity Seen in a Brain Gravely Injured
2) Reborn
I again say: #1 is anecdotal but somewhat disturbing.
#2, by comparison, is shattering. Give them some zolpidem, and some of them suddenly come alive? Even if it’s only a few?
But you were certain. You knew it all, didn’t you?
“But Dean, only a few respond to zolpidem treatment! So what?!?”
Yeah. Okay. So in the last year, how many people had their feeding tubes withdrawn when zolpidem therapy might have saved them? 2? 10? 100? Let’s say it was 100 worldwide at best.
The problem with Dean and others is that all coma patients = Terri Schiavo. But they don’t. Terri Schiavo was an extreme case in which her brain matter had essentially liquefied. Tossing up anecdotal evidence and medical breakthroughs in other unrelated and dissimilar cases does not change the fact that at the time of her death, her brain weighed less than half a normal human brain, and that it had been decimated by her tragedy to the point that she would have never recovered. That other individuals with less damage and different types of damage have recovered or might recover does not change Terri’s sad condition, and never will.
That will remain a truth no matter how many times you try to pretend her case is the same as other, more recent cases. The reason people were vehement about Terri Schiavo’s condition is because they were right, knew they were right, and the autopsy proved them absolutely right- not just ‘basically’ right.
So please quit pretending otherwise.